On the Importance of Being Bad

You have to suck at things before you can rock at things.

Photo By Tatiana Syrikova

A couple of years ago, I got a piece of advice that I’ve tried my best to take to heart because I believe it is extremely important to overall success. That advice is to get good at being a beginner at things.

We were really good at being beginners when we were young. Everything we encountered was a new chance to learn about the world, which at that time, we knew very little about. As a baby, you may stand up only to fall over, but you would just stand right back up again. You do this until you get your balance under control and are able to walk. Even then you may still occasionally fall over, and that’s totally fine. But imagine falling over now. How would you feel? And why would you feel that way?

If you are like most people, you’d probably be a little embarrassed about having fallen over. I mean you are an adult. You should be able to stay on your feet, right?

But herein lies the difference between being an adult and being a child. Or really, the difference between being an expert and being a beginner. When you are a beginner at something you are expected to fail. You are expected to fall onto your butt sometimes. Not so much when you are an expert. Because that gives evidence, at least to yourself, that you are not as much of an expert as you might have thought.

But is this really the case? Are experts always correct? No. They are not. Even experts can fall over. And that is completely and utterly okay.

But this is not natural for humans, at least adult humans. For some reason, we really hate sucking at things. Even, in fact, new things. Think about a time when you tried to start doing something new, but you quit because it was hard and you kind of sucked at it.

Now imagine if something being hard wasn’t a bad thing. What if it was a challenge? What if it was a game? What if being bad at something was fun? How many things do you think you would be good at now if you hadn’t minded sucking at them previously? What would you have stuck with that you gave up?

Being bad at things is important. Being bad at things allows you to prove to yourself that it’s okay to be bad at things. It allows you to show yourself that with practice, deliberate practice, being bad at things can actually make you very good at things.

And even if you are already good at things, there will always be some things that you are bad at even in the areas in which you are good, there’s always the next level.

So take this as a challenge. Find something that you are bad at and then practice being bad at it. Seriously. See how bad you can actually be. The more that you practice being bad at it, the more that you practice being bad at anything, the easier being bad at things will get, and the easier getting good at things will become.